Dr. Freud’s Process. Memory-Extirpation. Inner Circle Seminar 181 (23 September 2012)

Dr. Freud’s Process

Edward Bellamy, ca. 1889

Memory-Extirpation:
A Stage on Freud’s Way to ‘Psychoanalysis’


Baronin Anna von Todesco
later Anna Lieben
(Freud’s ‘Frau Cäcilie M.’)

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 181
Sunday 23 September 2012
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.





Fanny Moser
(Freud’s ‘Frau Emmy von N.’)

 

120 years ago, in December 1892, Breuer and Freud wrote: ‘The hysteric suffers mainly from reminiscences.’ Their ‘method of psychotherapy’, they claimed, ‘allows the strangulated affect’ of an ‘originally not abreacted idea’ an ‘outlet through speech’ and ‘brings it [the idea] to associative correction, in that it draws it into normal consciousness… or abolishes [aufhebt] it through medical suggestion…’ [emphasis added]. Thus one of their methods of dealing with ‘reminiscences’ was, they claimed, to ‘abolish’ them. On 20 July 1891, Freud wrote to his wife’s sister that Edward Bellamy’s novel Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process (1880) described ‘in phantastic form’ what Freud himself was doing with his patient Anna Lieben (‘Frau Cäcilie M.’ in the 1895 Studies on Hysteria). Dr. Heidenhoff extirpated his patient’s troubling memories with electroshock to the head, claiming that such extirpation was superior to catharsis or repentance as a ‘cure’ for the distress caused by these memories. In this seminar we shall examine the evidence that Freud attempted memory-extirpation with both Anna Lieben and Fanny Moser (‘Frau Emmy von N.’ in the Studies). We shall explore the idea in 19th-century psychiatry (Bernheim, Janet, Delboeuf,...) and literature (Dickens, Bellamy,…) that one can, or might be able to, as Shakespeare’s Macbeth put it, ‘pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written trouble of the brain’. And we shall investigate to what extent ‘memory-extirpation’ is practised, or attempted, today.

Venue: Durrants Hotel, 26–32 George Street, Marylebone, London W1H 5BJ (http://www.durrantshotel.co.uk/)

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £116, others £145, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, mineral water and liquorice allsorts included; payable in advance; no refunds unless seminar cancelled

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/  



The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and colleges.